The Long Way Round: Michel Couvreur and the Art of Making Whisky Wait.
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Michel Couvreur came to whisky from an unlikely direction: Through wine.
Born in Flanders, he entered the wine trade in Burgundy during the 1950s, at a time when the region’s great lesson was one of patience. Wine, in this tradition, was not considered finished when fermentation ended. What happened afterwards mattered. The cellar could soften, deepen, reshape. Wood, humidity, oxygen and time became part of the making.
The French call this élevage. It is an awkward word to translate neatly because it describes something broader than ageing. There is an idea of care in it, of bringing something towards maturity without dictating exactly what it will become.
Couvreur carried that sensibility with him when he encountered whisky in Scotland in the 1960s.
He might have followed the established path. Instead, by the late 1970s, he was taking Scottish distillates back to Burgundy and maturing them in his cellars at Bouze-lès-Beaune.
On paper, it sounds almost improbable: Scotch spirit travelling south to spend its formative years beneath Burgundian soil. Yet the logic was remarkably consistent with what Couvreur had learned from wine. Distillation was not the conclusion. It was the starting point.
For him, the still created the spirit; maturation gave it its character.
His cellars, approximately 15 metres underground, offered conditions quite different from those associated with many Scottish warehouses. The cool, humid environment encourages alcohol to evaporate more readily than water, allowing the whisky’s strength to fall slowly as it matures. It is a small but consequential distinction. The cellar does not merely contain the whisky. It participates in it.
So does the wood.
Couvreur sought out casks with lives of their own, particularly those that had held Oloroso, Pedro Ximénez and Amontillado. Their previous contents left more than flavour behind. They left traces: Dried fruit, nuts, spice, sweetness, oxidative richness. The history of the cask became part of the history of the whisky.
This is perhaps where Couvreur’s approach becomes most intriguing.
He did not treat Scottish distillate and Burgundian maturation as competing identities. He allowed them to coexist. Scotland supplied the spirit; Burgundy supplied the conditions in which it would develop. Neither was asked to imitate the other.
The result is difficult to reduce to a tidy category, which is rather the point.
Whisky has always been unusually attached to questions of place. Couvreur introduced another possibility: that place can be a beginning rather than a boundary. A spirit can leave the landscape in which it was distilled and acquire another sense of character elsewhere.
There is nothing especially fashionable about this idea. In fact, it feels almost old-fashioned: Trust the material, pay attention to the environment and give time enough room to do its work.
What was unusual was applying that instinct to whisky with such determination.
The four new 2026 expressions continue that experiment in different ways. Port brings a distinctly vinous dimension; Pedro Ximénez introduces its dense, dark sweetness; a French blended malt draws on a wider palette of Sherry casks; and a long-matured grain whisky is allowed to occupy a position it is rarely given - the centre of the conversation.
They are not simply four interpretations of the same house style. They reveal four different ways of thinking about maturation.
And that remains the most interesting thing about Michel Couvreur: Not that he made whisky in Burgundy, but that he questioned where the making of whisky actually ends.
Alekse Single Malt Whisky 2010 is perhaps the clearest expression here of what happens when Port becomes architecture rather than ornament.
Distilled from Classic Golden Promise on 13 November 2010, it spent its entire maturation in a Colheita Port cask from Graham’s Symington Deware before being bottled at 50% in January 2026. Just 1,200 500ml bottles were produced.
Deep amber with a ruby edge, it opens on damson, cherry and redcurrant, followed by the oxidative warmth of old fortified wine. The texture is remarkably supple. Then, as the sweetness recedes, darker notes emerge: rancio, dried spice and a fine thread of tannin that leaves the mouth gently gripped.
There is also a savoury quality that the French term sapidité captures better than “savoury” ever could. It is the sensation that makes the mouth water, creating appetite rather than simply satisfying thirst. Alekse has it in abundance.
At 50%, the whisky carries weight without becoming forceful.
It drinks less like a whisky finished in Port than like an old wine that somehow learned to speak in malt.
If Alekse reveals the quieter side of fortified-wine maturation, Blossoming Single Malt Whisky Lot 3725 is considerably more generous.
Single cask No. 1328 was distilled on 26 February 2009 and spent more than sixteen years in a Pedro Ximénez butt from Bodega Malaga Virgen. Bottled at 48%, from a natural strength of 53%, the July 2026 release comprises 650 bottles and 24 magnums.
The nose begins lightly: Orange peel, blossom, honey and dried petals. Then the whisky gathers weight. Cocoa and dark chocolate emerge alongside warm pastry spice, while a delicate bitterness keeps the sweetness in check.
That balance is important. PX can lend extraordinary richness, but Blossoming never becomes syrupy. At 48%, it retains texture and concentration without losing its sense of movement.
It also rewards time in the glass. Citrus gives way to honey, honey deepens towards chocolate, and spice arrives almost as an afterthought. Nothing announces itself all at once.
Blossoming is an apt name, then, not because the whisky smells floral, but because it behaves like something opening slowly.
It does not reveal everything at once. It unfolds.
With Hexanobile French Blended Malt Whisky, the Couvreur story moves from reinterpretation towards authorship.
The new distillery at Bouze-lès-Beaune extends that philosophy into production: Locally grown barley is malted in Dijon, fermentation takes place slowly in wooden vats using indigenous yeasts, and the spirit is double-distilled over direct flame.
Hexanobile occupies that fascinating space between what Couvreur inherited and what the house is now creating for itself.
The first regular French cuvée after the earlier Unexpected releases, it brings together around ten casks: Eight-year-old spirit from one French distillery matured in Fino, peated and unpeated eight-year-old spirit matured in PX, and twelve-year-old spirit from another French distillery matured in Amontillado and Oloroso. It is bottled at 46%.
The result is darker and more composed than the name might suggest. Dried flowers, spice and the walnut-like nuttiness of mature Sherry lead into a rounded palate, where roasted coffee, toasted grain and dark caramel gradually emerge. A fine thread of peat appears towards the finish.
And it is beautifully restrained.
There is no bonfire theatrics here, no attempt to make peat the headline. It works more like seasoning, sharpening the sweeter and more roasted notes around it.
Hexanobile is compelling for another reason. It has little interest in the increasingly tiresome question of whether French whisky can compete with Scotch. That is the wrong conversation.
The more interesting question is what French whisky might become when it stops looking over its shoulder.
Hexanobile does not quite answer that yet. It suggests it.
The distillery is now making its own spirit. The future is in the warehouses. And, after decades spent giving Scottish whisky a Burgundian life, Couvreur is beginning to give Burgundy a whisky of its own.
Then there is Upper Cap Blended Whisky, which quietly overturns another whisky convention.
Grain whisky has traditionally played the supporting role: Useful, economical and structurally important, but rarely afforded the mystique attached to malt. Upper Cap makes a persuasive case for reconsidering that hierarchy.
Built principally around 2007 grain whisky matured in very old Pedro Ximénez casks, with older lightly peated malts added to the blend, it is the more mature successor to Cap à Pie.
Bottled at 47%, the February 2026 release comprises 900 bottles and 24 magnums.
The nose begins almost confectionery - floral sweetness, Sherry and vanilla - before darker notes emerge. The palate is soft but spiced; the finish turns towards coffee, toasted cereal, charred wood and a discreet thread of smoke.
What lingers is not the peat or the PX, but the grain itself.
Given fifteen years, serious wood and sympathetic maturation, it develops a vocabulary of its own. PX supplies weight and depth; the lightly peated malt brings definition. Grain is not filling space around the malt. It is carrying the whisky.
That feels distinctly Couvreur, i.e. take something familiar, remove the assumption surrounding it and see what remains.
Taken together, the four 2026 releases reveal a remarkably consistent philosophy.
Alekse explores Port through tannin, dried fruit and rancio. Blossoming finds richness and restraint in PX. Hexanobile turns the house’s accumulated knowledge towards French distillate. Upper Cap asks what grain can become when it is given the same seriousness normally reserved for malt.
The answer, in each case, begins with the same principle: Maturation is not an afterthought.
For Couvreur, the cask is an active force. Whisky moves through the cellars by gravity; cold filtration is avoided; bottling happens when the spirit has reached the balance the house is looking for, rather than because a schedule says it should.
It is a philosophy with something geological about it. Distillation happens quickly. Transformation does not.
The new distillery at Bouze-lès-Beaune now brings that philosophy full circle. Local barley is malted in Dijon; fermentation is deliberately extended; the spirit is double-distilled over direct flame. But the house has imposed one final discipline on itself: Waiting.
Those first distillates will need years before they are ready. 2032 is already on the horizon.
In a culture that increasingly mistakes speed for progress, there is something quietly radical about making a whisky whose most important ingredient cannot be hurried.
That may be Michel Couvreur’s enduring lesson. The still determines where a spirit begins. The years that follow determine what it becomes.
And Couvreur, characteristically, is prepared to wait and find out.
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Words by AW.
Photo courtesy of Michael Couvreur.
